Starting to plan my own layout for a change was looking back at MR’s Salt lake Route and came up with one conclusion. It seems an odd place (on the map) to have a furniture maker. So this brings me to my query. Going with plausibility over prototypically, what rail industries would be more appropriate for a Utah desert city?
Just east is the Wasatch National Forest. Plenty of trees in the near by area. You can see the green from Google Earth.
I’ll try this one, since I live out here in the UT desert…
One thing to start - I was never a big fan of this particular project layout, since the scenery and industry didn’t represent the prototype well at all in my opinion. It just doesn’t look like UT or NV. I’d suggest looking at Google maps or equivalent for the entire route, and check things out on Street View to get a feel for the places that interest you.
Industries vary between railroads. The real “Salt Lake Route” had or has typical urban area industry in the cities like Las Vegas and the Wasatch Front (Salt Lake, Provo, etc.); distribution centers, steel fabrication, chemicals, etc. Something like a furniture factory would fit in here, but not in the middle of nowhere like on the layout where there isn’t a local supply of lumber.
Some of the larger towns have agriculture and business that you would associate with it (think Milford and Delta in UT), feed mills, elevators and such. Milford has a lot of pig farms, and there’s a big concrete elevator off to the edge of town near the yard. There used to be several agricultural branches emanating from around Delta. Take a look at this site http://www.pbase.com/sanoyes/elevator_west and scroll down to the photos of elevators and such at Milford, Delta, Llyndl, Cedar City and so on. Argribusiness is found wherever there’s enough water to irrigate crops and feed cattle, sheep or pigs.
US Steel had a major integrated steel mill at Geneva near Provo, UT. http://utahrails.net/industries/geneva-steel.php It’s almost all gone now but looked like what you might imagine a steel mill to be, with blast furnaces, rolling mills and so on. Lots of steel fabrication industries still located in the area used product from Geneva to make trusses, beams, pipes, grinding ba
Most of that forest isn’t anything that’s harvested for lumber or useful commercially if it was harvested. There are a lot of small trees like scrub oak (Gambell oak), bigtooth maple and junipers that make up most of the green you see on the maps. A large proportion are 15-20 feet tall or less. There is some timber harvest from coniferous forests in the Wasatch Plateau to the south and east, and from the Uinta Mountains. The project layout plopped a furniture plant where there’s really nothing local to use, unless they wanted to make furniture out of junipers, and no population to justify bringing in the wood by truck or rail. The urban Salt Lake City area does have furniture factories, mostly using wood from non-local sources.
Maybe they make modern furniture out of steel tubing and plastic. Or get teak in containers from Malaya. However, in a town of twenty-four hundred people, fifty miles from anything and not on or near any major highways…
Seriously, if you use the name North Las Vegas instead of Caliente you can legitimately include a concrete batch plant, a paper cup factory(!), several propane dealers (Look, Ma, weiners on wheels!) and a train-truck transload facility, as well as several anonymous warehouse-type buildings and an intermodal yard on a reverse loop. You could also put downtown Sin City on your backdrop. Granted that the tunnel country is 'way north, but any layout involves selective compression.
I do beg to differ with Ron, who says that the countryside doesn’t look right. If all you can model is the space between the right-of-way fences, the terrain will NEVER look right. I didn’t see any glaring anachronisms (other than the bridge, which is way overkill for a dry wash.)
Chuck (North Las Vegas resident modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Hey Chuck - how scenery hits us is subjective. I didn’t think the project layout scenery looked like Caliente or the Meadow Valley Wash. Something about it just bugged me. I agree the bridge scene didn’t pull off as well as it could have because it crossed a small side drainage and wasn’t landscaped into a central channel from the wash. There are substantial bridges in the area modeled, although not necessarily good matches for the model used.
UP has several truss and girder spans in the wash and around Caliente like this http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2730487 . They also have some large bridges crossing the often dry Mojave River nearby in CA that served as prototypes for the brass truss bridges from BLMA http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2850366 and http://www.blmamodels.com/cgi-bin/webstore/shop.cgi?ud=BQAEBwkNAAYCBxQUEBEcHAEACQMIBAwECQkTEQAA&t=main.blue.htm&storeid=1&cols=1&categories=01001-00021&&c=detail.blue.htm&t=main.blue.htm&itemid=5002.
A few shots in the article do include a center beam flat of dimensional lumber being “delivered” to the furniture plant. I do agree with everyone so far that the double-track steel through-truss bridge is a bit over bearing, but I also think the mini-tunnel in the middle of the wash was unneeded either.
I’m still planning ideas for a first layout which is why I went and took a look back at this one. I have not built a layout yet.
That part makes sense. Locate the industry in an urban area or a smaller town very close by and it would be plausible. Outside of an older downtown core, the building would possibly fit in best if modeled as a one-story concrete or metal pre-fab structure.
It probably wasn’t a desert until the furniture maker cut all the trees down.